Ukraine is one of the world’s unhappiest countries, a recent poll shows.
Ukraine has a happiness index of just 14%, which means Ukrainians are the fifth unhappiest nation on earth, according to an annual survey by Swiss-based pollster Gallup International, which surveyed people in 41 countries.
The poll shows that Ukrainians are slightly happier than Armenians and Hongkongers.
The unhappiest country is North Macedonia, where the happiness index is -3%.
The happiest people live in Kyrgyzstan, where the score is 85%, followed by Kazakhstan with 78% and Colombia and Ecuador with 77% each.
Answering the question “How happy or unhappy do you feel about your personal life?”, 49% of Ukrainians said they are happy and 35% said they are unhappy. The remaining 14% said they are neither happy or unhappy.
A recent poll conducted by Swiss-based pollster Gallup International shows that 35% of Ukrainians are unhappy about their life. In Ukraine, the poll was conducted by the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation and the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in December 2020.
Compared to Ukraine’s 14% score, the world average is 40%, but it’s been declining. In 2014, the world average was 64%, but it dropped to 48% four years after, in 2018.
Still, Ukraine’s happiness index is rising — it was just 8% in 2017. Petro Burkovskiy, senior fellow at the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, believes this shows that the Ukrainian economy is actually improving.
“The fact that people feel much better now than they did (three) years ago indicates that an economic revival is in progress,” Burkovsky told the Kyiv Post. His foundation conducted the poll with the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology on behalf of Gallup International in Ukraine.
Burkovskiy has also pointed out that the level of happiness in Nigeria is 70% and only 7% in much more progressive Hong Kong. He says it shows the difference in the perception of happiness among citizens of different countries rather than the standard of living and level of the country’s development.
“Researchers explain it by varying requests for happiness and dissimilar requirements for life,” Burkovskiy said.
Gallup International has conducted the annual survey since 1977.
